Has Taylor Swift lost it?

The Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant once remarked that every successful musician has what he called ‘an imperial phase’, during which they can apparently do no wrong. In the case of Taylor Swift, the most successful and famous musician on the planet, her imperial phase has lasted from 2012, when she released her breakthrough album Red, until now, when she gifted the world her latest record, The Life of a Showgirl. It’s 2025’s most anticipated and most hyped release, following her lengthy, world-conquering Eras tour, and handily comes off the back of her engagement to American football player Travis Kelce, who many of its songs are about.

In other words, it’s a guaranteed success, and from a commercial perspective, it is another undeniable hit. It has sold 2.7 million copies on its first day of release – at a time when virtually any other artist selling a tenth of those copies would be considered a hit – and was bolstered by an equally lucrative film, The Official Release Party of a Showgirl, which appeared in cinemas for one weekend only and still made around £35 million worldwide.

Yet, perhaps for the first time in her career, not everyone has drunk the Kool-Aid when it comes to Pennsylvania’s most famous daughter. While it’s going too far to suggest that the album has been panned, critics in both Britain and America have been unusually dismissive of Life of a Showgirl. Alexis Petridis, perhaps the most incisive music writer in this country, wrote in the Guardian that it’s ‘just nowhere near as good as it should be given Swift’s talents, and it leaves you wondering why’, while India Block in the Standard was even harsher, writing: ‘I was beginning to wonder if I was accidentally listening to a parody album hallucinated by some porn-addled AI.’ The influential American title Pitchfork, meanwhile, sighed: ‘Showgirl sounds like much of the pop music you have heard over the past 10 years and throughout your lifetime; it asks that this time, you listen more closely, because this is Taylor Swift, with the enormity of commercial power and cultural significance and algorithmic rank that implies.’

None of these reviews are wrong. The Life of a Showgirl (produced and co-written by Max Martin and an oddly-named Swedish man called Shellback) is musically undistinguished and lyrically dull and repetitive, with Swift alternating between cooing admiration of her all-American swain – how very different to the effete British men that she briefly dated and then tore into on her later albums – and half-hearted attempts to own the zeitgeist. Thus Swift continues a feud with Charli XCX (the origins of which will only be known to those who spend more time than is healthy on Reddit), likens herself to Millais’ Ophelia (in the same way that Florence Welch has spent most of her career doing), and even has a song called ‘Cancelled!’, which seems like something that could never happen to her. Swift could, as Donald Trump once said of himself, stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot people, and she would be unlikely to lose many of her ardent fans, several of whom would probably argue that the victims were fortunate to be murdered so Swiftly.

Some of Swift’s fans are making a valiant effort to defend The Life of a Showgirl. It is, they say, supposed to be bad. The uninspired lyrical content, so-so tunes and generally rushed feel of the album – which was largely written and recorded while she was on tour – are all excused as being part of a grander strategy that us mere mortals will one day wholly understand. This may in fact be true, since little is impossible when it comes to Swift. (Her 2017 album Reputation, which was once written off as uninspired pap, now sounds like a sleek, challenging electropop masterpiece.) 

The less starry-eyed among her listeners, however, might just view the new album as a case of inspiration running dry. Swift has phoned it in because she knows people will buy anything she releases. This makes sound economic sense, but artistically it is wrong. ‘Haters gonna hate,’ Swift once sang. This time, the haters might have a point.